The Constant Gardener (10 page)

“Nightclubs? Justin? What a wonderful thought! Annabel's maybe, twenty-five years ago. Whatever gave you that idea?” Woodrow exclaimed with a heartier laugh than he had had for days.

Rob was happy to enlighten him. “Our Super, actually. Mr. Gridley, he did a spell in Nairobi on liaison. He says the nightclubs are where you'd hire a hit man if you had a mind to. There's one on River Road, a block away from the New Stanley, which is handy if you're staying there. Five hundred U.s. and they'll whack out anyone you want. Half down, half afterward. Less in some clubs, according to him, but then you don't get the quality.”

“Did Justin love Tessa?” Lesley asked, while Woodrow was still smiling.

In the relaxed spirit that was growing up between them, Woodrow threw up his arms and offered a muted cry to heaven. “Oh my God! Who loves whom in this world and why?” And when Lesley did not immediately relieve him of the question: “She was beautiful. Witty. Young. He was forty-something when he met her. Menopausal, heading for injury time, lonely, infatuated, wanting to settle down. Love? That's your call, not mine.”

But if this was an invitation to Lesley to chime in with her own opinions, she ignored it. She appeared, like Rob beside her, more interested in the subtle transfiguration of Woodrow's features; in the tightening of the skin lines in the upper cheeks, the faint blotches of color that had appeared at the neck; in the tiny, involuntary puckerings of the lower jaw.

“And Justin wasn't angry with her—like about her aid work for instance?” Rob suggested.

“Why should he be?”

“It didn't get up his nose when she banged on about how certain Western companies, British included, were ripping off the Africans-overcharging them for technical services, dumping overpriced out-of-date medicines on them? Using Africans as human guinea pigs to try out new drugs, which is sometimes implied if seldom proved, so to speak?”

“I'm sure Justin was very proud of her aid work. A lot of our wives here tend to sit back. Tessa's involvement redressed the balance.”

“So he wasn't angry with her,” Rob pressed.

“Justin is simply not given to anger. Not in the normal way. If he was anything at all, he was embarrassed.”

“Were you embarrassed? I mean, you here at the High Commission?”

“What on earth by?”

“Her aid work. Her special interests. Did they conflict at all with HM interests?”

Woodrow composed his most puzzled and disarming frown. “Her Majesty's government could never be embarrassed by acts of humanity, Rob. You should know that.”

“We're learning it, Mr. Woodrow,” Lesley cut in quietly. “We're new.” And having examined him for a while without for one second relaxing her nice smile, she loaded her notebooks and tape recorder back into her bag and, pleading engagements in the town, proposed they resume their deliberations tomorrow at the same hour.

“Did Tessa confide in anyone, do you know?” Lesley asked, in a by-the-by tone as they all three moved in a bunch toward the door.

“Apart from Bluhm, you mean?”

“I meant women friends, actually.”

Woodrow ostentatiously searched his memory. “No. No, I don't think so. Nobody comes specifically to mind. But I don't suppose I'd know really, would I?”

“You might if it were someone on your staff. Like Ghita Pearson or somebody,” said Lesley helpfully.

“Ghita? Oh well, obviously, yes, Ghita. And they're looking after you all right, are they? You've got transport and everything? Good.”

A whole day passed, and a whole night, before they came again.

•      •      •

This time it was Lesley not Rob who opened the proceedings, and she did so with a freshness that suggested encouraging things had happened since they last met. “Tessa had had recent intercourse,” she announced in a bright start-the-day sort of voice as she set out her properties like court exhibits—pencils, notebooks, tape recorder, a piece of india rubber. “We suspect rape. That's not for publication, though I expect we'll all be reading it in tomorrow's newspapers. It's only a vaginal swab they've taken at this stage and peeked through a microscope to see whether the sperm was alive or dead. It was dead, but they still think it may be more than one person's sperm. Maybe a whole cocktail. Our view is they've got no way to tell.”

Woodrow sank his head into his hands.

“We'll have to wait for our own boffins to pronounce before it's a hundred per cent,” Lesley said, watching him.

Rob, as yesterday, was nonchalantly tapping his pencil against his big teeth.

“And the blood on Bluhm's tunic was Tessa's,” Lesley continued in the same frank tone. “Only provisional, mind. They only do the basic types here. Anything else, we'll have to do back home.”

Woodrow had risen to his feet, a thing he did quite often at informal meetings to put everyone at their ease. Strolling languidly to the window he took up a position at the other end of the room and affected to study the hideous city skyline. There was freak thunder about, and that indefinable smell of tension that precedes the magical African rain. His manner, by contrast, was repose itself. Nobody could see the two or three drops of hot sweat that had left his armpits and were crawling like fat insects down his ribs.

“Has anyone told Quayle yet?” he asked, and wondered, as perhaps they did, why a raped woman's widower suddenly becomes a Quayle and not a Justin.

“We thought it would be better coming from a friend,” Lesley replied.

“You,” Rob suggested.

“Of course.”

“Plus it is just possible—like Les here said —that she and Arnold had one last one for the road. If you want to mention that to him. It's up to you.”

What's my last straw? he wondered. What more has to happen before I open this window and jump out? Perhaps that was what I wanted her to do for me: take me beyond the limits of my own acceptance.

“We really like Bluhm,” Lesley broke out in chummy exasperation, as if she needed Woodrow to like Bluhm too. “All right, we've got to be on the lookout for the other Bluhm, the beast in human shape. And where we come from, the most peaceable people will do the most terrible things when they're pushed. But who pushed him—if he was pushed? Nobody, unless she did.”

Lesley paused here, inviting Woodrow's comment, but he was exercising his right to remain silent.

“Bluhm's as close as you'll ever get to a good man,” she insisted, as if good man were a finite condition like Homo sapiens. “He's done a lot of really, really good things. Not for display, but because he wanted to. Saved lives, risked his own, worked in awful places for no money, hidden people in his attic. Well, don't you agree, sir?”

Was she goading him? Or merely seeking enlightenment from a mature observer of the TessaBluhm relationship?

“I'm sure he has a fine record,” Woodrow conceded.

Rob gave a snort of impatience, and a disconcerting writhe of his upper body. “Look. Forget his record. Personally: do you like him, yes or no? Simple as that.” And flung himself into a fresh position on his chair.

“My God,” said Woodrow over his shoulder, careful this time not to overdo the histrionics, but allowing nonetheless a note of exasperation to enter his voice. “Yesterday it was define love, today it's define like. We do rather chase our absolute definitions in Cool Britannia these days, don't we?”

“We're asking your opinion, sir,” said Rob.

Perhaps it was the “sir's” that turned the trick. At their first meeting it was Mr. Woodrow, or when they felt bold, Sandy. Now it was sir, advising Woodrow that these two junior police officers were not his colleagues, not his friends, but lower-class outsiders poking their noses into the exclusive club that had given him standing and protection these seventeen years. He linked his hands behind his back and braced his shoulders, then turned on his heel until he faced his interrogators.

“Arnold Bluhm is persuasive,” he declared, lecturing them down the length of the room. “He has looks, charm of a sort. Wit if you like that type of humor. Some sort of aura—perhaps it's that neat little beard. To the impressionable, he's an African folk hero.” After which he turned away from them, as if waiting for them to pack and leave.

“And to the unimpressionable?” asked Lesley, taking advantage of his turned back to reconnoiter him with her eyes: the hands nonchalantly comforting one another behind him, the unweighted knee lifted in self-defense.

“Oh, we're in the minority, I'm sure,” Woodrow replied silkily.

“Only I imagine it could be very worrying for you—vexing too, in your position of responsibility as Head of Chancery—seeing all this happening under your nose and knowing there's nothing you can do to stop it. I mean you can't go up to Justin, can you, and say, ”Look at that bearded black man over there, he's carrying on with your wife,“ can you? Or can you?”

“If scandal threatens to drag the good name of the Mission into the gutter, I'm entitled—indeed obliged—to interpose myself.”

“And did you?”—Lesley speaking.

“In a general way, yes.”

“With Justin? Or with Tessa directly?”

“The problem was, obviously, that her relationship with Bluhm had cover, as one might say,” Woodrow replied, contriving to ignore the question. “The man's a ranking doctor. He's well regarded in the aid community. Tessa was his devoted volunteer. On the surface, all perfectly aboveboard. One can't just sail in and accuse them of adultery on no evidence. One can only say—”look here, this is giving out the wrong signals, so please be a little more circumspect.“”

“So who did you say it to?” Lesley asked while she jotted in a notebook.

“It's not as simple as that. There was more to it than just one episode—one dialogue.”

Lesley leaned forward, checking as she did so that the spool was turning in her tape recorder. “Between you and Tessa?”

“Tessa was a brilliantly designed engine with half the cogs missing. Before she lost her baby boy, she was a bit wild. All right.” About to make his betrayal of Tessa absolute, Woodrow was remembering Porter Coleridge seated in his study furiously quoting Pellegrin's instructions. “But afterward—I have to say this—with enormous regret—she struck more than a few of us as pretty much unhinged.”

“Was she nympho?” Rob asked.

“I'm afraid that question is a little above my pay grade,” Woodrow replied icily.

“Let's just say she flirted outrageously,” Lesley suggested. “With everyone.”

“If you insist”—no man could have sounded more detached—“it's hard to tell, isn't it? Beautiful girl, belle of the ball, older husband—is she flirting? Or is she just being herself, having a good time? If she wears a low dress and flounces, people say she's fast. If she doesn't, they say she's a bore. That's white Nairobi for you. Perhaps it's anywhere. I can't say I'm an expert.”

“Did she flirt with you?” asked Rob, after another infuriating tattoo of the pencil on his teeth.

“I've told you already. It was impossible to tell whether she was flirting or merely indulging her high spirits,” said Woodrow, reaching new levels of urbanity.

“So, er, did you by any chance have a bit of a flirt back?” Rob inquired. “Don't look like that, Mr. Woodrow. You're forty-some-thing, menopausal, heading for injury time, same as Justin is. You had the hots for her, why not? I'll bet I would have.”

Woodrow's recovery was so quick that it had happened almost before he was aware of it. “Oh my dear chap. Thought of nothing else. Tessa, Tessa, night and day. Obsessed by her. Ask anyone.”

“We did,” said Rob.

•      •      •

Next morning, it seemed to the beleaguered Woodrow, his interrogators were indecent in their haste to get at him. Rob set the tape recorder on the table, Lesley opened a large red notebook at a double page marked by an elastic band and led the questioning.

“We have reason to believe you visited Tessa in the Nairobi hospital soon after she lost her baby, sir, is that correct?”

Woodrow's world rocked. Who in God's name told them that? Justin? He can't have done, they haven't seen him yet, I'd know.

“Hold everything,” he ordered sharply.

Lesley's head came up. Rob unraveled himself and, as if about to flatten his face with his palm, extended one long hand and laid it upright against his nose, then studied Woodrow over the tips of his extended fingers.

“Is this to be our topic for the morning?” Woodrow demanded.

“It's one of them,” Lesley conceded.

“Then can you tell me, please—given that time is short for all of us—what on earth visiting Tessa in hospital has to do with tracking down her murderer—which I understand is the purpose of your being here?”

“We're looking for a motive,” said Lesley.

“You told me you had one. Rape.”

“Rape doesn't fit anymore. Not as motive. Rape was a side effect. Maybe a blind, to make us think we're looking at a random killing, not a planned one.”

“Premeditation,” Rob explained, his big brown eyes fixing Woodrow in a lonely stare. “What we call a corporate job.”

At which, for a brief but terrifying moment, Woodrow thought of absolutely nothing at all. Then he thought corporate. Why did he say “corporate”?

Corporate as performed by a corporation? Outrageous! Too farfetched to be worthy of consideration by a reputable diplomat!

After that his mind became a blank screen. No words, not even the most banal and meaningless, came to rescue him. He saw himself, if at all, as some kind of computer, retrieving, assembling and then rejecting a train of heavily encrypted connections from a cordoned-off area of his brain.

Corporate nothing. It was random. Unplanned. A blood feast, African style.

“So what took you to the hospital?” he heard Lesley saying as he caught up with the sound track. “Why did you go and see Tessa after she lost her baby boy?”

“Because she asked me to. Through her husband. In my capacity as Justin's superior.”

“Anyone else invited to the party?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Maybe Ghita?”

“You mean Ghita Pearson?”

“D'you know a different one?”

“Ghita Pearson was not present.”

“So just you and Tessa,” Lesley noted aloud, writing in her notebook. “What's you being his superior got to do with it?”

“She was concerned for Justin's welfare and wished to reassure herself that all was well with him,” Woodrow replied, deliberately taking his time rather than respond to her quickening rhythm. “I had tried to persuade Justin to take leave of absence, but he preferred to remain at his post. The EADEC annual conference of ministers was coming up and he was determined to prepare for it. I explained this to her and promised to continue to keep an eye on him.”

“Did she have her laptop with her?” Rob cut in.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Why's that so difficult? Did she have her laptop with her—beside her, on a table, under the bed, in it? Her laptop. Tessa loved her laptop. She e-mailed people with it. She emailed Bluhm. She e-mailed Ghita. She e-mailed a sick kid in Italy she was looking after, and some old boyfriend she had in London. She e-mailed half the world all the time. Did she have the laptop with her?”

“Thank you for being so explicit. No, I saw no laptop.”

“What about a notebook?”

A hesitation while he searched his memory and composed the lie. “None that I saw.”

“Any you didn't?”

Woodrow did not deign to answer. Rob leaned back and studied the ceiling in a falsely leisured way.

“So how was she in herself?” he inquired.

“Nobody's at her best after producing a stillborn baby.”

“So how was she?”

“Weak. Rambling. Depressed.”

“And that was all you talked about. Justin. Her beloved husband.”

“So far as I remember, yes.”

“How long were you with her?”

“I didn't time myself, but I would imagine something in the region of twenty minutes. Obviously I didn't want to tire her.”

“So you talked about Justin for twenty minutes. Whether he's eating his porridge and that.”

“The conversation was intermittent,” Woodrow replied, coloring. “When someone is feverish and exhausted and has lost her child, it is not easy to have a lucid exchange.”

“Anyone else present?”

“I told you already. I went alone.”

“That's not what I asked you. I asked whether anyone else was present?”

“Such as who?”

“Such as whoever else was present. A nurse, a doctor. Another visitor, a friend of hers. Girlfriend. Man friend. African friend. Like Dr. Arnold Bluhm, for instance. Why do I have to drag it out of you, sir?”

As evidence of his annoyance, Rob unwound himself like a javelin thrower, first flinging a hand in the air, then tortuously repositioning his long legs. Woodrow meanwhile was again visibly consulting his memory: bringing his eyebrows together in an amused and rueful frown.

“Now you come to mention it, Rob, you're right. How very clever of you. Bluhm was there when I arrived. We greeted each other and he left. I would imagine we overlapped by the better part of twenty seconds. For you, twenty-five.”

But Woodrow's careless demeanor was hard won. Who the devil told him Bluhm was at her bedside? But his apprehension went further. It reached into the darkest crevices of his other mind, touching again on that chain of causality he refused to acknowledge and Porter Coleridge had furiously ordered him to forget.

“So what was Bluhm doing there, do you suppose, sir?”

“He offered no explanation, neither did she. He's a doctor, isn't he? Apart from anything else.”

“What was Tessa doing?”

“Lying in the bed. What did you expect her to be doing?” he retorted, losing his head for a moment. “Playing tiddlywinks?”

Rob stretched his long legs in front of him, admiring his huge feet down the length of them in the manner of a sunbather. “I don't know,” he said. “What do we expect her to be doing, Les?” he asked of his fellow officer. “Not tiddlywinks, for sure. There she is lying in bed. Doing what? we ask ourselves.”

“Feeding a black baby, I should think,” Lesley said. “While its mother died.”

For a while the only sounds in the room came from passing footsteps in the corridor, and cars racing and fighting in the town across the valley. Rob reached out a gangly arm and switched off the tape recorder.

“As you pointed out, sir, we're all short of time,” he said courteously. “So kindly don't fucking waste it by dodging questions and treating us like shit.” He switched the tape recorder back on. “Be so good as to tell us in your own words about the dying woman in the ward and her little baby boy, Mr. Woodrow, sir,” he said. “Please. And what she died of, and who was trying to cure her of it and how, and anything else you happen to know in that regard.”

Cornered and resentful in his isolation, Woodrow reached instinctively for the support of his Head of Mission, only to be reminded that Coleridge was playing hard to get. Last night, when Woodrow had tried to reach him for a private word, Mildren had advised that his master was cloistered with the American ambassador and could be reached only in emergency. This morning Coleridge was reportedly “conducting business from the residence.” 5

Woodrow was not easily unmanned. In his diplomatic career he had been obliged to carry off any number of humiliating situations, and had learned by experience that the soundest course was to refuse to recognize that anything was amiss. He applied this lesson now as, in curt sentences, he gave a minimalist's rendering of the scene in the hospital ward. Yes, he agreed —mildly surprised that they should be so interested in the minutiae of Tessa's confinement—he distantly remembered that a fellow patient of Tessa's was asleep or comatose. And that since she was not able to feed her own baby, Tessa was acting as the child's wet nurse. Tessa's loss was the child's gain.

“Did the sick woman have a name?” Lesley asked.

“Not that I recall.”

“Was there anybody with the sick woman—a relative or friend?”

“Her brother. A teenaged boy from her village. That is how Tessa told it, but given her state, I do not regard her as a reliable witness.”

“D'you know the brother's name?”

“No.”

“Or the name of the village?”

“No.”

“Did Tessa tell you what was wrong with the woman?”

“Most of what she said was incoherent.”

“So the rest was coherent,” Rob pointed out. An eerie forbearance was settling over him. His gangling limbs had found a resting place. He suddenly had all day to kill. “In her coherent moments, what did Tessa tell you about the sick woman across the ward from her, Mr. Woodrow?”

“That she was dying. That her illness, which she did not name, derived from the social conditions in which she lived.”

“AIDS?”

“That's not what she said.”

“Makes a change, then.”

“Indeed.”

“Was anyone treating the woman for this unnamed illness?”

“Presumably. Why else would she be in hospital?”

“Was Lorbeer?”

“Who?”

“Lorbeer.” Rob spelled it. “”Lor“ like ”Lor“ help us, ”beer“ like Heineken. Dutch mongrel. Red-haired or blonde. Mid-fifties. Fat.”

“I've never heard of the man,” Woodrow retorted with absolute facial confidence while his bowels churned.

“Did you see anyone treat her?”

“No.”

“Do you know how she was being treated? What with?”

“No.”

“You never saw anybody give her a pill or inject her with anything?”

“I told you already: no hospital staff appeared in the ward during my presence.”

In his newfound leisure Rob found time to contemplate this reply, and his response to it. “How about non'-hospital staff?”

“Not in my presence.”

“Out of it?”

“How should I know that?”

“From Tessa. From what Tessa told you when she was being coherent,” Rob explained, and smiled so broadly that his good humor became a disturbing element, the precursor of a joke they had yet to share. “Was the sick woman in Tessa's ward—whose baby she was feeding—receiving any medical attention from anyone, according to Tessa?” he asked patiently, composing his words to fit some unspecified parlor game. “Was the sick woman being visited—or examined—or observed—or treated—by anyone, male or female, black or white, be they doctors, nurses, nondoctors, outsiders, insiders, hospital sweepers, visitors or plain people?” He sat back: wriggle out of that one.

Woodrow was becoming aware of the scale of his predicament. How much more did they know that they weren't revealing? The name Lorbeer had sounded in his head like a death knell. What other names were they about to throw at him? How much more could he deny and stay upright? What had Coleridge told them? Why was he withholding comfort, refusing to collude? Or was he confessing all, behind Woodrow's back?